Bat Update, Blog Outreach

Photo by Tim Ryan, whose skill is undeniable, whether it's a real camera or one in a phone.

Writing from Woodward, Oklahoma, home of the second annual Lesser Prairie-chicken Festival, where my arrival with T. R. Ryan and Debby Kaspari coincided with curtains of nonstop frog-drowning rain and steadily falling temperatures. We repaired to the local Wal-mart, where you can git anything you want, from matching green rubber boots to ponchos to extra pullovers to Tickle Me Elmo flannel jammie pants to thick socks to thermal underwear to strange rubber turkeys that were in the hat section and had slits in the bottom but were probably not hats after all. We bought all of that and more because the roads are all washed out and we'll have to walk to try to see lesser prairie-chickens if we're going to see them at all. And yes, we're having a blast anyway.

Mini-update: The storm system sagged south of us, the skies cleared, we never got rained on, and I now have seen sparring lesser prairie-chickens on the lek. My Swarovski binoculars have one broken eyepiece so they're now monoculars. Must've been a fluke, because they only fell about two feet! No worries--I have my lovely Swarovski scope and all I have to do is send the binocs to the factory when I get home and they'll fix them for free.

I've gotten all my thank-you notes written, to all of you who helped me through the bat episode and helped fund my rabies pre-exposure inoculations. My mama taught me how to write 'em, and she also taught me how to hoard pretty little cards for the time when you'll need them. I've gone through quite a few pretty little notecards, the ones that bad bad Charlie didn't chew to smithereens. I've had the pleasure of corresponding with a bunch of readers who might otherwise have remained unknown to me. It's been really cool. You are an amazing bunch of people and I feel deeply blessed to share a connection with you.

As a Pretend Scientist, I'm incredibly flattered when Real Scientists read my blog and write to say so. I got an email today from one such person, a fabulous woman who sent me my first game camera, telling a story of coincidence that I thought you'd enjoy. I'm excerpting, but the gist is there:

(Our college) had spring break about when you started posting about your bats. We had a class (studying) in Belize (but) I didn't get to go along this year. When the class came back, one of the students told her dad the story about the bat that flew into their room one night. He subsequently called the Center for Disease Control who then called our county health department who then called the student health center...and the result was that 3 of 7 people who were under the roof where the bat had been (none of these people ever touched the bat) went to the emergency room and had post-exposure shots - about $2000 each. I became involved because I am our resident disease ecologist and I was asked to provide our administrators with information on rabies (hopefully in Belize).

Your posts and the link to the USGS publication were incredibly helpful. I also consulted a friend of mine who is an excellent bat biologist. What eventually happened was the health department kept calling the students and faculty who decided against the shots (even though they did not know that no one touched the bat) - these students held firm and decided not to get the shots. The whole thing was really scary...I didn't want to give them the wrong advice, but I also felt that the risk was nearly zero! So all of this rambling to say, thanks for your thoughtful posts on the bat adventures. They were extremely timely and helpful. The USGS document even included data from Belize!

The document she's referring to is "Bat Rabies and Other Lyssavirus Infections" by Denny Constantine. It's available for free, here. Thanks again to Timothy Winship for the link and the information. The ripples of outreach spread outward, ever outward. And nothing is for naught.

Nine-hundred and fifty Girl Scouts were put through post-exposure rabies vaccinations after bats were found roosting in their cabins at a retreat. Does having a bat in the same room really equate to a rabies exposure? You can't be too careful, or can you?

Makes you wonder how we all survived our childhoods. Bill of the Birds returned from Guyana, having slept in a cabin for two nights with the gentle patter of bat urine and turds raining on his mosquito netting, to the mini-drama unfolding in his own home. I slept in the same cabins two years ago. Well, I tossed and turned there. I wouldn't call it sleeping.

One person in the U.S. has died of the big brown bat rabies strain since 1958. There are indications that this strain may not be as infective or virulent to humans as others. Rabies is not transmitted by magic. You really need bat saliva containing the virus in a bite or scratch wound (which can be microscopic) or on a mucous membrane to constitute an exposure. The stories and studies alleging possible aerosol transmission of rabies in bat caves are questionable. Two spelunkers who contracted the disease in Frio Cave, Texas were wading in knee-deep guano while being collided with by clouds of bats--does that sound like aerosol transmission to you? Sounds like they got bitten or scratched to me. A horrid experiment in which opossums were caged in a teeming bat cave for several weeks resulted in several of the animals contracting rabies. Thanks to the cage wire, they couldn't make direct contact with the bats, but bat urine and effluent rained down on them, as well as live bat lice...well, hmmm. Could they have been bitten by lice that had just bitten a rabid bat? Well, yeah, you'd think so. Again--doesn't sound like aerosol transmission to me. Nor does it sound like magic. People should stay out of bat caves unless they're vaccinated and have a darn good non-recreational reason to be there, like to study and help the bats.

Research is ongoing, trying to focus down on the incubation period of rabies in bats. It appears to be rather short--generally a couple of weeks from infection to the appearance of symptoms-- and the course of the disease is quick, too. A rabid bat is dead within a week. How I wish rabies weren't in the picture where bats are concerned. Bats have more than enough bad press via folklore, and now face the most devastating epizootic perhaps in history--white nose disease--which is killing them by the hundreds of thousands in the Northeast. Bats are not out to get us. Bats are just trying to live their lives, and they desperately need friends. Now, I feel safe in being one of those friends, having finished my series of three prophylactic (pre-exposure) vaccinations. And I thank you for helping me do that.



On the evening of Sunday, April 4, Bill and I saw the first big brown bat of the season, flittering about our birding towertop. It was a fine sight. I immediately wished for a huge bat house all along the south face of the tower, wished for it to be filled with bats. I took that as a sign that my enthusiasm for bats has been tempered but not extinguished, not by a long shot. I am sadder but, thanks to my friends, much wiser.

Dee Dee is still at the Ohio Wildlife Center, where she is getting flight conditioning. She broke the straw-fine bones of her fingertips when she beat them against the glass of her super-deluxe tank. I didn't realize it had happened until I saw her swollen fingertips, and even then I didn't realize that she'd broken them.
I had hung two towels along the side for roosting, but didn't know that it's necessary to pad the glass with nonskid foam drawer liner as well, because Dee liked to crawl between the towel and the glass and that's where she did the damage to her wingtips. Now I know that. Here's how they looked soon after the injury:


You can see the bent fingertip in the lower left corner of the photo.



When I saw the swelling in her fingertips I searched online for "swollen finger bones captive bats" and got a web site that advised that Dee Dee might have a bacterial infection treatable with Clavimox. So I got some Clavimox from a friend who is a veterinarian, and gave that to her twice a day. After a week, they seemed a lot better.


When I brought her to Ohio Wildlife Center, Animal Care Director Lisa Fosco took one look at her and said, "That's not an infection. Those are fractures." She then explained how it must have happened, all for the want of some foam padding which I didn't even know Dee needed. My heart, which had already fallen through my chest when I surrendered Darryl to be tested for rabies, fell even farther. I felt I'd done everything wrong that it was possible to do wrong, all in trying to do something right.

Dee Dee's wingtips curl inward, and her wings look cupped when she flies. Lisa said Dee might still be able to fly well when the tiny bones healed and were no longer sore; she said she's seen a bat with its wingtips missing fly just fine. I got an email last week, and learned that Dee Dee (BigBrownBat #243) is making progress under the expert care of Lisa Fosco and other OWC staff and volunteers. She was flying markedly better than she did when I brought her in two weeks earlier. (They take them into a big room at night and let them fly to see how they're faring. Ooh, can I help?)

As we've seen, rehab stories don't always end well, so I am very cautiously optimistic. I have all my fingers crossed that she'll be able to fly well enough for release. I call upon you, my beloved flying blogmonkeys, to unleash the power of positive thinking and envision Dee Dee rising high and diving nimbly above the gracious old homes of Marietta, Ohio in mid-May, making her way to her maternity roost, Darryl's child safe inside her.

That's Dee in front, hiding under Darryl's leg membrane, in happier days.

Bat Reproduction, and an Appeal

Dee Dee the big brown bat is a silky burnt sienna brown, and her fur is so soft you almost can't feel it. When I first got her she smelled terrible--a skunky foxy musk that apparently emanated from facial glands. I wondered if I'd be able to stand the stink. Now she's almost odorless, just the faintest sweet peaty scent that's quite pleasant. I didn't understand why that would be until I frightened her one day recently by surprising her when I lifted her towel. She must have been deeply asleep, maybe dreaming of summer evenings and tender moths. She chittered, gaped at me and emanated an incredible wave of musk. Oh! That's why she stank when I first got her--she was afraid. Poor little thing.

Needless to say, I am no longer afraid of her, either. Maybe I stank to her when we first met. But now we understand more about each other.

Chances are very good (probably 90%, based on current research) that DeeDee is storing sperm from an autumnal mating in 2009. Big browns mate before going into hibernation, and the female can store viable sperm for up to four months. One source I found says they store the sperm in the uterus. Birds store it in little side pockets of the oviduct, and then release it to fertilize an egg. Bat babies in Ohio are born in May or June. Here are some photos I found on the Net from a study of big brown bat maternity roosts. Here's a bat carrying a single fetus:



and here's a girl carrying twins.


Both x-ray photos from the Fort Collins Bat Project

I found myself very moved by these photos; they somehow erased the differences between us, and united us as mammals. Perhaps it's because they remind me of my carefully-saved sonagrams of Phoebe and Liam in utero, those perfect skulls, those perfect beaded spinal columns, the sheer wonder of being a live-bearing mammal, being able to have a being within a being.

Now you try to build a sentence that uses "being" four times.

If all goes well, DeeDee will be taken to Columbus for flight conditioning in mid April, and when the weather is warm enough, released right outside the house where she was found, long before she needs to find a maternity roost and give birth to her pup or pups. She knows the neighborhood; she may have lived there for 20 years, for all we know. She'll go back to her life, find a maternity roost with other big brown bats, give birth, and leave her newborn young in a cluster of other babies when she goes out to forage. (I had always thought they somehow flew with the baby clinging to them, but they don't. Catching flying insects is a flip-upside-down, sudden-change-of-direction proposition, a highly acrobatic endeavor, and a new baby would probably go hurtling off the first time Mom caught a moth.)

As much as I'd like to see a baby big brown bat, I absolutely do not want Dee Dee to give birth in a 20 gallon fishtank with a screened top. Please hold onto that sperm for awhile, Dee. Wait to start gestating until we can get you outdoors where you belong.

Brace yourself for teh OMG:

This is a baby big brown bat that has gotten sand stuck to it. It's being given a drink by a rehabilitator. From bestfriends.org

There's something about this baby bat that makes me want to give a long, drawn out squeeeee!!! Kind of a mix of wanting to take care of it and flipping out at how weird it is.


If we can get her to a maternity roost before she delivers, Dee Dee will find her baby by crawling about and listening for its voice among all the other squeaks. She'll lick its face and muzzle before taking it to nurse and sleep with it. Within three or four days, its eyes will open, and in about three weeks the baby will be flying itself. I doubt anyone knows whether Mom brings it insects, the way many songbirds do, for weeks after it starts flying. These are the kinds of things I wonder about bats, coming from my birdy background.

There are other things I wonder about bats. I wrote that line, "Needless to say, I am no longer afraid of her, either" before I heard from several readers, well-informed, virologist/veterinarian readers, about mysterious and apparently magical means of rabies transmission--aerosolized urine? By simply having a bat in your house or bedroom? By having a bat touch but not bite you? Whaa? How exactly does that work? Doesn't an actively rabid animal have to chomp down on you to transmit rabies? Well, nobody really knows. And when you're talking about a disease that's 100% fatal once contracted, who can afford to question it?

Having had bat pee rain down on me in both Guyana and Brazil, it's a wonder I'm still alive. And I think about all the people who live and work in places that have bat colonies--barns and warehouses and churches...spelunkers knee-deep in bat guano...I dunno. The bat seems perfectly healthy, eating well and acting normal. I've taken every precaution, always wearing gloves and long sleeves, keeping the bat tank scrupulously clean, banishing everyone else from the room when I'm handling it, and yet last night I dreamt that Liam chased a couple of kids down on the playground and bit them. I woke with a start. It was horrible. I lay awake each night thinking about it all, wake up feeling tired and punky. I reach for my water glass, wondering if my throat is going to suddenly close up and my fever is going to spike and that'll be it, folks, because by the time you show symptoms of rabies you're already dying.

Dying. Nobody wants to die, and I'm one of 'em. I have a lot to do, a lot more to learn, a lot more to teach. The world is just so wonderful, full as it is of miracles and marvels like these little winged mammals, and I want to show it all to you, to everyone. I wonder if it's all worth it, worrying like that just so I can help a bat.

I should go get the shots. I should scrape up $700 and go get the shots. Chances are, I'll get more bats in future years, and it just makes sense not to have to live in fear. Here's the hard part: I would like to ask for your help. It's probably obvious from the virtually ad-free template that I have resisted any temptation to commercialize this blog, but this feels like a special case. I took on the bat because I wanted to be able to learn about it so I could write about it and share that with you all. I came within a hairsbreadth of punting the animal to someone who knew what they were doing and already had the pre-exposure vaccinations. But I wanted to write about bats. I wanted to understand something more about them. I figured out what I'd gotten myself into well after the fact, and once again you, my readers, informed me, not the other way around. I get just as much out of this experience as you do, and its richness continues to amaze me.

If you would like to help (and any amount would help, and be much appreciated), here's the address:

Julie Zickefoose

Indigo Hill

Whipple, OH 45788

If you prefer PayPal, scroll down to the "DONATE" button at the bottom of the page.

Though the admittedly cryptic address is good (I checked with the Whipple postmistress), I don't know if this appeal will work. I humbly thank you in advance for anything you're able to come up with, and I promise I'll let you know when to stop.

Bats and Rabies (What You've All Been Wondering)

ZICK ALERT! I'll be giving a free public lecture tonight, Thursday, at Jefferson Middle School, 21 Moffett Street, Pittsburgh, PA. Come see me! It'll be fun!

Is that a Pez dispenser, loaded with mealworms, or a bat in your glove? Nom nom nom.

All right. On to the health issue. According to the Organization for Bat Conservation, started by my friends Kim Williams and Rob Mies, I have a better chance of winning my state lottery jackpot or being murdered by my husband than dying of rabies from a bat bite. I just love that pairing of statistics.

Given my propensity for messing around with wild things, I suspect my chances of being murdered by my husband are better than average. I'm thinking of the time I promised him a turkey vulture wouldn't vomit if we drove it to Columbus in the Bird Watcher's Digest company van. And then, whoops, it did. So I'm not sure I like those odds.

Arming myself with information, I have taken a course in handling and keeping rabies vector species and learned a lot about the disease, its course in wild animals and humans, and its prevention. The course is required by the State of Ohio to get a certification to handle these species, which appears on my rehabilitation permit. The instructor of the course told me that, given the probability that I will be handling only one or two healthy bats each year, the rabies prophylaxis shots, while recommended, are neither required nor particularly warranted. If I were taking in a whole bunch of bats, coons, foxes and skunks, doing that as a full-time thing, it would be wise to get the $700 series of vaccinations. I wish it were as cheap to protect myself as it is to protect Chet. However, if I do happen to get bitten by a bat, even one that appears healthy, I'm required by law to have its head removed and sent to a state lab for testing. That's the cost of flying without a net. Obviously, my motivation to prevent myself being bitten is extremely high. I wear gloves and long sleeves, period. No one else in the house is allowed to handle the bat.

I know there are those who, reading this, will be afraid. Afraid for me, afraid for my family. I offer this: Yes, bats can get rabies. But they are not passive carriers of rabies, as I had always erroneously supposed. In fact, when they get rabies, they show symptoms and die from it, like any other mammal. Once a bat starts showing symptoms, it will be dead within a week. And only a bat showing symptoms can transmit rabies in its saliva, for the virus has to have infiltrated the brain both to cause symptoms and enter the saliva. We don't know the incubation period of rabies in bats. That would be a good thing to know. It's quite rapid--about a week to ten days--in most furbearing mammals, although one fox was known to have developed the disease 15 months after being exposed. Eep.

The percentage of wild bats with rabies is approximately one half of one percent. I was surprised to learn how low the incidence is. The percentage of bats (often visibly ill) which are brought to health departments and test positive for rabies is approximately five percent. Bats that are compromised enough to be grounded and captured are obviously a sample skewed toward sick animals.

My nephew named her Fledermaus, but I call her DeeDee. Middle name: Marie. And I am grateful that she has come into my life. It's like having a teacher in all things bat-related staying for a little while. And I can already tell that our time together will be too short.

Bat Care

The bat my mother-in-law found in her living room is a big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus, as evidenced by her long, foxy muzzle. Little brown bats look kind of smoosh-faced but not in a cute, Boston-terrier like way; more in an otherworldly way. Their faces and muzzles are furry, not naked like the big brown's. Here's a photo of a little brown bat from batguys.com. I could definitely love a little brown bat, but it isn't as sweet and familiar looking as the big brown bat.


Little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus. Photo from batguys.com

Big brown bats are irreproachably cute micro foxes. And they're only big in comparison to pipistrelles and little brown bats. They're about 4 to 5 inches long, with a 11-13 inch wingspan. They weigh only 1/2 to 5/8 ounce. They don't have hollow bones or air sacs like birds; their flight is the feat of an acrobat who must flap continuously to stay aloft.

The vast majority of bats found in homes are big brown bats. They seem to be better (or worse, depending on how thrilled you are at finding one in your kitchen) at getting into the occupied parts of houses.

Care of overwintering bats is not difficult, because they sleep all day and almost around the clock. I can change the papers, food and water in her tank without ever disturbing her as she hangs on the sidewall, hidden in her toweling. She eats live mealworms, which are fed my new favorite nutritious substance, chick starter, with carrots for moisture. This is called "gut loading." The idea is, if you feed the worms good stuff, the bat or whatever eats them gets good stuff, too. I can attest that mealworms grow like Topsy when kept in chick starter. It would seem to me to be a good idea for anyone feeding mealworms to wild birds to keep them in chick starter rather than plain old fashioned oats. But then I'm all about taking care of wild things, and I'm thinking a lot more about nutrition these days, having had some evidence that we can hurt the things we love most with the wrong foods.

When the towels get soiled, every four days or so, I gently fold her into her dirty washcloth and place her in a lidded Tupperware. Then I thoroughly clean the tank and gently transfer her to freshly-laundered towels on the tank wall. That's my favorite part, because I get to talk to her and transfer her from one towel to another. At first I had to unhook her feet from the dirty towel, but now she scuttles up onto the clean towel as soon as I open my hand. Bats learn fast.

Routine care doesn't make her mad any more. I get just a little whiff of musk from her facial glands, a pleasantly skunky waft, a desultory chitter. And her fur is smooth and shiny, not all rumbly like it was when I first got her. She's been preening. I can see the towels shake as she rearranges her fur. Sometimes I see her licking her hooks and feet and armbones like a cat. She can scratch her head and neck with her hind feet. Having always thought of bats as kind of bound up in their own wing and tail membranes, I'm pleased and surprised to see how flexible and mobile they are.

I risk a stroke toward her back end as I hold her head and wings securely in the glove. It's amazing. Her fur is so soft you can't even feel it. She doesn't so much as turn her head, but she kind of shrinks in when I touch her. Her whole being vibrates, and I imagine she is talking, saying something about my temerity for daring such a thing.




She hangs there all day, sleeping and preening and scratching, folded into her towels. She much prefers dark colored cloths. She's become so tame that it's hard to get her to chitter and cuss at me now. I wish I had taken photos of her teeth when she was just captured--they are impressive! Edges like a pinking shears, oversized for her tiny mouth, and strong--she would bite the tweezers and nearly twist them from my fingers, clang!! No wonder I was a little eepy about her.

Here's the not-so-easy part of keeping a bat over the winter. It needs to be released when the weather warms reliably in spring, when the nights stay in the 50's. And several weeks before that, it needs to have a heated place where it can exercise and get its muscles conditioned for flight. And there's the rub. I have a tent made of nylon screening that would be a fabulous flight space, except for the fact that any big brown bat worth its salt would be outta there in two minutes. They're escape artists par excellence. At the Ohio Wildlife Center, they have to roll up towels under the flight room door, for goodness' sake, because the bats will go out that tiny space. Smart, smart, smart. And tiny, tiny, tiny, and endlessly flattenable, like flying Flat Stanleys, bats are. So I'll have to head to Columbus for flight conditioning several weeks before release time. And pray that Dee Dee doesn't have her bab(ies) before she's released near her maternity roost.


All right. I've made some of this bat care thing sound easy. But I have to tell you that you MUST have a permit from your state to keep any wild animal, and for a rabies vector species like a bat, you must also have a RVS certification on that permit. This is for your own protection as well as the bat's. They're not pets. They do a good job of looking like them on my blog. But I don't cuddle them and I handle them as little as possible. They're wild animals and they're destined for release.

The day my permit came in the mail with the rabies vector certification on it, I decided that I wouldn't trade it for a diamond ring. What can you learn from a diamond ring?

Big Brown Batgirl

Big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus

Fasten your seatbelts. I'm gonna go all bats on you. And you're going to love it. Bats are pretty much my favorite animal now, right after ligers. Which, as you probably know, are bred mainly for their skills in magic.

Back to bats.

It's a late winter Wednesday. My mother-in-law, Elsa Thompson, notices a bat flying around in her living room and kitchen. While most people would scream and dive for cover, Elsa takes mild note of the event and hopes she will eventually find the bat where she can catch it. She's done this before. And she is not your garden-variety mother-in-law, being co-founder of both Bird Watcher's Digest and The Marietta Natural History Society.

Friday. Elsa opens the basement door and sees a bat roosting in the jamb, near her pegboard full of pots and pans. She captures it in a towel and installs it in a glass vase with a towel in the bottom and colander over the top. Later, she adds a ball of raw hamburger and a cut-up grape. She calls me and tells me she's seen the bat tugging at the grape. What else should she offer it? That evening, I swoop in on my way to the movies and give the bat a dozen mealworms off the end of a tweezers. Thank goodness I always keep mealworms on hand in a couple of plastic shoeboxes, where they reproduce and offer themselves up to save whatever foundling I have on hand, even in January. The bat is very hungry and thirsty, having expended valuable energy by flying around a warm house for three days. It's evidently found its way downstairs from the cold attic, where it should be hibernating.

While we're holding the bat in a towel, it squirms around and gets away, making loops around the living room. It vanishes and I stand stock-still in the living room, looking carefully. I find it resting atop a warm DVD player, and pick it up in the towel to continue feeding it. I will not realize until much later how lucky I was to have relocated that animal.

Sunday. I pick the bat up in the evening. Elsa's been ably caring for it and feeding it in the meantime. I've called the Ohio Wildlife Center and found out that protocol for a healthy bat found in a warm house in midwinter is to keep it until it can be released outside in spring. Oh! My! That sounds like a job! Thank goodness I'm permitted and certified by the State of Ohio to handle and keep rabies vector species like bats. Even so, I make plans to have Bill transport it to the OWC clinic in Columbus in the morning, where they are hosting eight overwintering bats in just the same straits. He's on his way to the airport anyway. You see, I am just a little eepy about handling and keeping a bat in my house. I am thinking rabies and disease and gloves and towels and guano and kids and eep eep eep.

Who are you, little one? You're so foreign to me. I have no mental template for how you should look or behave. I need to know you.

Something happens to my brain (not a dread viral disease, but a chemical shift) between Sunday night and Monday morning, and I decide not to unload the bat on OWC just yet. I've been researching bat care online. And I want to make sure it can feed itself from a dish. I want to make sure it's in top condition before I fob it off on anyone else. I want to get to know it better. And I have a small suspicion that I'm falling out of fear and into love.


It's a female, and she seems thin and ribby to me, maybe a bit dehydrated. She chitters and cusses at me in an ultrasonic voice when I handle her. She sounds like an angry hummingbird, bzzbzzbzzzbzzbzzzbzzbzzz! For the next two days, I hold her in my glove while I feed her crickets twice a day. I can feel her voice vibrating even when I can't hear her. Then I find a good piece online, written by Susan Bernard of Basically Bats, called Bats in Captivity, which warns that hand-fed bats might not take food again on their own. Uh-oh. I decide to offer mealworms and crickets in a little shallow dish, and water in another as they suggest, and quit handling her to feed her. It seems a better solution all around.

By now the bat is installed in a plastic pet carrier meant for small mammals and reptiles. I've got a washcloth doubled and draped down the side where she can hang upside down in comfortable darkness. The food and water dishes are on paper towels below her. Since she'd be hibernating anyway, she doesn't need to fly around, and she's perfectly still and sleeping all day. The next morning, the mealworm dish stands empty. Well, that was easy. The next night, I creep in with a little flashlight cupped in my palm so only a tiny ray of light sneaks out, and I catch her elbowing over to her mealworm dish, which she lustily empties. I let a little more light fall on her and she glares at me and retreats into her washcloth roost, a tiny, deeply offended Dracula, fleeing the dawn. By now I am completely in love. I'm glad I don't have to handle her and stress her, and she is, too.

Maybe I can do this bat care gig. She's a whole lot less trouble than a macaw. And she is really, really adorable.

I'll be speaking about this little messenger from above (and a bunch of other stuff) starting at 5:30 PM tomorrow night, Friday, March 12, at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, for its William and Nancy Klamm Memorial Lecture in its Explorer series. There will be live music, refreshment, exhibits, a book signing, Phoebe and a very excited, dino-crazy Liam in attendance. I've spent the week tearing my Letters from Eden talk all to bits as only a crazy Mac Lady can. It's all new. If you're anywhere near Cleveland, I'd love to meet you. Remember to blurt "BLOG!" You can register here.

If you miss the Cleveland talk, come hear me at nearby Black River Audubon's "Outstanding Speakers" series the very next night, Saturday, March 13, at 7 pm. It'll be at Lorain Co. (Ohio) Metroparks' Carlisle Visitor Center. Details are here. Another big weekend!

And on Sunday I'll tell you more about the big brown bat. There is a lot to tell.